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Our Xeround test… failure and old fashioned solution

With the growth of the amount of beta users and the size of each one we realized our database infrastructure was not scalable enough. With a growth addition of nearly 3 million extra interactions on the platform we hit the top. Our servers went out for 10 minutes in January and we had to act fast.

Scaling a a database on the Amazon EC2 platform is a challenge, it’s not like all other cloud services: just pump it online and ‘they will store it’ looking at how we could store billions of new database records every month in a more scalable solutions we found Xeround. This new startup wants to be the database cloud storage in MySQL format. Seems a dream came true: just pump a database over to Xeround and it will automatically scale over multiple EC2 instances.

Our try with the very helpful team of Xeround we got a little more than the normal 500MB beta space and we pumped a 5GB database over to give it a serious try. Growing it with 1GB each week using test-scripts we found it did not yet have the stability we require.

So back to the traditional ‘split them up’ solution and we now implemented a more standard solution of spreading the clients over instances and moving them around based on the volume they need. It seems to be a bit low-tech, but besides Xeround there does not seem any other economically interesting cloud database solution out there.

Our guess is that this infrastructure should get us well underway in 2011 and by the time Xeround irons out the issues we can give that a try again. But if you are looking for a database in the cloud, try them out, it might work for you. Every cloud application is different.

For our beta users… you will not notice anything, and no need to change any scripts or code. The only think you hopefully have seen is… a faster responding application.

Co-founder and CEO of Convert.com passionate in building communities that care. Trying to make that happen inside and outside Convert. I love working with my team to make our A/B testing software better for agencies and e-commerce clients.